How a backyard trampoline turned Andale’s Gage Cooper into a state champion
At Andale, championships are part of the air athletes breathe.
Andale is known for its team success in football, volleyball, track and field, softball and basketball. Gage Cooper is no different from any other Andale athlete who grew up wanting to be a part of that championship culture. He just wasn’t sure where he fit in.
He thought he was too small for football and not big enough for basketball, either, even if that remained the sport he loved most. So at the start of his high school career, he went searching for something else.
What he found was a sport no one at his school did.
And now Cooper has made it his own, becoming a two-time Kansas state champion diver with one of the most unusual origin stories in the state.
Earlier this month in Lenexa, Cooper won the Class 5-1A state diving title with a final score of 474.55, the third-highest mark in the history of the 5-1A state meet.
The path that led Cooper there did not begin in a pool. It began on a trampoline.
“I was like an ADHD kid growing up, so I just always liked to jump around,” Cooper said. “If I ever got bored, I would just go out on the trampoline in the backyard and mess around. Then I started trying to copy tricks that other people would do, then that turned into me trying to invent new tricks on my own.”
That backyard became his laboratory. Cooper would watch videos online, study the movements and try to duplicate them. Then, once imitation no longer felt like enough, he started creating his own tricks. He was doing flips and twists, then bigger flips and harder twists. Before long, he was landing quads and even quints.
He started posting the videos on social media. The clips gained traction. Accounts that track national records began reaching out and asking to share his videos. That attention opened a door Cooper never expected: an invitation to a national freestyle trampoline competition.
At 13 years old, he took first place.
Most kids would have treated that as the culmination of a cool hobby. For Cooper, it turned into the foundation for his next athletic endeavor.
When he started high school, his mother encouraged him to pursue a sport that might someday help him earn a college scholarship. Cooper started going down the list in his head. Football didn’t feel realistic. He loved basketball, but he knew his size worked against him there too. He considered pole vault because it at least made use of his body control and aerial instincts.
Then the answer hit him: diving.
There was just one problem. Andale didn’t sponsor a swimming and diving team. It didn’t even have a pool.
That is where luck intervened.
Cooper lived next door to Tyler Fraizer, who just so happened to be the athletic director at Bishop Carroll and knew what Cooper could do on a trampoline and could envision how those gifts might translate to the diving board. So Fraizer helped handle the paperwork and worked out a co-op arrangement with Andale, creating an avenue for Cooper to train and compete with Bishop Carroll’s boys swimming and diving team during the season.
So while Cooper attends school at Andale, he makes the 30-minute drive into Wichita to train with Bishop Carroll under coach Spencer Shellhammer. In the postseason, he splits off and represents Andale as an individual.
“In diving, you look for that finesse and Gage has that ability to make everything look really nice,” Shellhammer said. “A lot of it honestly comes from his years and years of trampoline practice. So when he started diving, he already knew how to flip and how to twist and it was just figuring out how to apply it to a diving board.”
On the trampoline, survival instincts tell you to protect yourself and avoid landing on your head. In diving, the entire sport asks you to override that instinct and enter the water headfirst with precision and confidence. For Cooper, that became the first real mental hurdle.
Once he cleared it, the rise was rapid.
Kansas does not often see a newcomer arrive in diving with elite body control already baked in. Cooper’s background gave him a technical head start, but Shellhammer said what has pushed him toward championships has been the work that followed. Since he arrived, Cooper has refined his technique, sharpened the details and improved every year.
Shellhammer believes Cooper still has room to chase something even bigger before his career is over: the 5-1A state meet record of 533.55 points, set in 2015 by Blue Valley West’s Daniel Fectean.
That possibility would have sounded far-fetched just a few years ago, back when Cooper was just a kid bouncing in his backyard and filming tricks for the Internet.
There’s something fitting about the way Cooper found his niche. At a school where so many athletic traditions are already established, he managed to carve out something different. He did not join the crowd. In a place full of champions, he became one in a sport that did not exist in his school before he came along.
“I do really like diving now,” said Cooper, who admits basketball is still his first love. “I’m just glad that I was able to find a sport that I can kind of call mine since no one else in my school really does it.”
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